


every maid is the maid for me

by jonphaedrus



Category: Tales of Xillia
Genre: F/M, Gen, heckie spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-29
Updated: 2013-10-29
Packaged: 2017-12-30 20:35:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1023108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wonders if all boys see their mothers naked. Or if any men do.</p><p>(Note: This work is full of emotional abuse. It is very dark. I'm sorry.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	every maid is the maid for me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rethira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rethira/gifts).



> I wrote this to the song [every maid is the maid for me/I am a maiden cold and stately](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVkPLjR6gYY) and it was supposed to be about how Alvin slowly gets better at handling relationships with women and eventually romantic relationships and culminating in Jude and instead it turned into this and I'm extremely sorry.

He wonders if all boys see their mothers naked. Or if any men do.

Gilland isn't that much older than him, so much younger than his father was. Maybe the age doesn't matter, because Leticia seems to like him well enough. Alfred hates Gilland. Gilland doesn't even bother to hide taking her. Sometimes Alfred listens through the wall between their cabins and hears his mother screaming, but never anyone's name. He waits for Gilland's footsteps to leave and then goes back to clean her up every time.

He thinks about other boys his age he sees sometimes. Gilland took him to Rashugal once, and he saw a little boy with his mother and he spilled something and she cleaned it up for him.

He wipes the mess Gilland leaves on her up with a cloth, he tucks her in. When she bleeds he puts the cloth between her legs and takes it out when she's done. He wipes the tears from her cheeks. He holds the bin when she vomits.

Gilland hits him when he catches Alfred doing it.

One night, Alfred wakes up to his mother screaming his name over and over again. He has forgotten what her anguished sounds are like.

When he manages to get to her, Gilland is wiping blood off of his mouth and Leticia is hardly breathing. Alfred keeps hearing himself screaming. When he doesn't stop, Gilland slaps him and shoves him to the ground.

"She didn't do her job. You finish."

Gilland fills his mouth with heat and blood and finishes on his face, and Alfred cleans it up crying, hiccuping and coughing, and that night he takes a rowboat and slowly rows to shore. His mother doesn't speak. She hardly sees. He pulls her out of the boat and she says,

"Where's Alfred?"

\---

Isla smiles and it's all teeth and lies. Alvin knows what the blood on her hands is from and he wants to call her on it, but she holds the little packet of medication and he thinks about his mother, thinks about what Gilland did to her body, thinks about the broken organs that the doctors found when they looked at her out of the boat, and he hands her the money and hates himself.

She always charges more when Leticia gets sicker. Every time she does, he hates himself and crawls back to his contact and hears his uncle's sneers. Gilland makes him do his mother's job, and pays him extra when he does the job she left unfinished and his own job too.

He thinks about the child, and the spill he made. He thinks about the blood and the sound that bullets make in bone and remembers the taste of blood and other on his tongue. At least the bile overpowers it. He loads his gun, and kills another man. He pays Isla more.

She says she's just doing it to get by. He never thinks that when he watches his mother get sicker.

Maybe it would be easier if he just let her go. Maybe she would be happier.

He knows he would be happier if he could just stop living it.

\---

Presa is cold and gorgeous, her jaw high and her eyes narrow. She's all danger and sharpness and frozen blades and Alvin, all of twenty, is hopelessly in love for the first time in his life. She's easily almost ten years older than him, but she's everything he could ever want in a woman. She has a soft spot for young men, she says. He watches her body when she walks, watches the way her hands shake when she lies to him about who she really is, and he ends up living with her for longer than he should.

He wonders if this is what Derrick gave up when he ran away so many years before with the nurse who had cared for them all when they had washed up on shore. He wonders what kind of a child he could have with Presa, wonders if that child would be just as icy, just as in tune with the frozen winds and mists.

He holds the gun to her temple and says her real name, and wonders what their baby could look like. His dark hair, maybe, her long thin face. They're both tall, so any child would be tall. He wonders, when she clutches him in ice, when she freezes him to the ground, what it would be like to get married and settle down with her.

\---

He has nightmares about making Milla go on her knees. He almost wakes up screaming once; her eyes are almost the same colour as his mothers. How easy it would be. If Gilland had her, he knows what would happen.

Imagine forcing the woman that had done all of this to them in the first place to take something, to love them. Gilland would try. Thats why Alvin holds the gun to her head. That's why Alvin knows he has to but the bullet through her skull.

She doesn't smile, but she knows him in a way nobody and nothing else ever has. She sees the broken parts of him and crushes them under her bootheel and reminds him that he can, too. He wants to learn how to like she does. He wants to worship her, he wants to bow before her feet and pray.

She's the strongest person he's ever met; putting a bullet in her brain would be disgusting it wouldn't be right but he can never forget the way that he saw Gilland look at her and the darkness in his eyes.

When Gilland orders them not to kill her Alvin knows right away what he wants her for. He wants the Otherworld Reactor plan. He wants Milla. He wants to destroy her inside and out. Alvin knows he never could, she would die before she let him try.

He tries to put a shot through her head before Gilland breaks her like he's broken everything else he's ever touched, and when his uncle orders no he nearly turns his gun on the man instead. Nearly blows his brain out the back of his skull. He hasn't got a Mana Lobe. Alvin's never heard a bullet go through someone without a Mana Lobe.

He never has the chance but he doesn't know if he even could have managed it. His hands shook too much. Maybe he should have turned his gun on himself instead.

\---

He's pulled a thousand triggers a thousand times. Inches from his target, miles from his target. He's watched the light go out of someone's eyes, he's held a broken dead body. He's stared down the muzzle just as many times.

The rapport of the gun firing sounds like his heartbeat, the creak of the trigger is his breathing, the click of the parts together is the motions of his bones.

When his finger jerks on the trigger and he didn't mean to he didn't mean to he didn't mean to and Leia falls over and _he didn't mean to **he never meant to do that**_ but he did it he did it he watched Leia fall and break and shatter and her body on the ground and her blood on his hands.

He remembers his uncle showing him how to wrap his fingers around a gun and how to pull the trigger, he remembers the first Riezan he ever killed—a girl. She couldn't have been older than Leia. He remembers throwing up afterward, but almost being happy to be praised for killing someone. Who praised a six year old for killing someone?

Its so much louder when it's Leia. There's blood on her pretty white clothes that she had told him were hand-me-downs from when her mother was training to become a Grandmaster. There's blood all over Jude's face and body and he keeps screaming her name and Alvin didn't mean to.

He hates everything he's done. He hates himself. He hates his gun he hates his hands he hates it. He hates that he didn't save her he could have saved her.

He sticks the barrel of the gun in his mouth and thinks about Gilland it always makes him think of Gilland and he's too scared to pull the trigger because the only person who has the right to pull the trigger is Jude and Jude would make him live because Jude thinks he can still be saved.

\---

All he had to do to go wrong was be Muzét. He was inches from her; from that edge. He teetered on it, but he didn't fall.

Jill fell. Jill fell, kept falling, fell until she was gone and nothing was there. Jill, who he could have saved.

Alvin pressed the barrel of his gun to Jude's forehead and put his finger on the trigger. He could have pulled it.

He put his foot on the line, but when he looked down—he wasn't brave like Jill. He wasn't scared like Muzét.

He was a coward; and he ran. He couldn't face the fall.

He was only ever an accomplice to the drop.

\---

Elize has seen through him every time he's ever needed to be seen through, and times he hasn't either. She takes one look at him and she sniffs in disdain and he doesn't blame her but he wishes he could.

She's all the things that he tried to be, and none of the things he is. She is a child soldier by her own choice and her own effort, she is a master of her destiny and her fate, she regrets nothing but the choices others made for her. He never wanted the weight of a gun in his hand, he never mastered anything, he regrets only the decisions he made for himself because he didn't have to he could have been better he could have been stronger and he didn't and he wasn't and now he never will have the chance.

How easy would it have been, he wonders, to give her over. How easy Gilland would have broken her if he'd turned her in the way he was supposed to. She would have been like him. Her eyes would have the same haunted shattered look from her own lying ghosts.

It could have happened.

He could have made it happen.

He doesn't deserve the kiss to his cheek or the smile she hides for him.

But she makes it clear that he doesn't deserve the barrel in his mouth either, and that the line and the fall wasn't meant for him, that the mercy blow was never one he could have given, that nothing he did could have saved Leticia or stopped Isla, that he never had to bear the weight of Gilland's guilt.

He stops looking down the barrel of the gun or feeling the bile in his throat. He steps back from the ledge.

He is forgiven for his faults, and bears only the guilt he must.


End file.
